Clara did something magical.

Not the wand-waving, spellbook kind of magic but the kind that lives in the in-between moments. The kind that only children and old women know how to hold without breaking it. Her apartment was a quiet place, sun-drenched and always smelling faintly of coffee and starch. But one wall stood out…covered in trolls and vintage wallpaper.

Tiny wooden painted trolls from Norway, each with wild hair and crooked smiles. Some mischievous, others wise. All frozen mid-movement, mid-thought, as if they might come alive the moment your back was turned.

She called them her venner… her “friends.”

“Disse holder øye med deg, lille due,” she’d whisper. These are watching over you, little dove.

And somehow, I believed her. Of course I did. Clara never needed proof. Her love was proof.

She kept her past close to the chest, but when the light hit just right and I asked gently enough, she’d let pieces slip through her stories. She told me once, half-whispered and half-dreaming, about a man who had gone missing in Vermont – a neighbor, maybe, or a neighbor’s son. A murder, perhaps. Hidden. Unspoken. All she said was he owed a lot of money, and money made men crazy. She mentioned his bones coming from the ground. I don’t know who killed this man, or if the story is even true. But, she told me she honored his spirit, and when she heard about his death, she snuck into his home and covered the entry mirror and stopped the great grandfather clock, to help his soul move on peacefully. Not stuck in the world, as we know it. She wouldn’t speak of it much. She would say:

“People don’t talk about such things in small towns,” folding a dish towel as if it held fragile truth.

“Folk gjør som om det aldri skjedde…” People act like it never happened.

I didn’t know what to make of it. I was only a child, and murder was a word with edges I hadn’t yet learned to fear. But the way Clara said it, soft, sad, matter-of-fact, it stuck with me like a shadow behind a curtain.

She always blended the old world with the new. Her stories spun between fjell and fjorder, between ghosts and grandmothers, grief and gumdrops. I was the odd girl out in most places, adopted, awkward, hungry for belonging. But with Clara, I was never too much. Never too strange.

She made me feel like I came from somewhere ancient and brave. Like the roots of my story went deeper than my name on a piece of paper or the whispers I wasn’t supposed to hear.

And those trolls? One is still on my bookshelf, right now, as a matter of fact.

He is still watching.

I swear he is.